The team behind the secure email service, ProtonMail, have just announced their latest product, ProtonMail Bridge. It enables users to connect their preferred desktop mail clients to their ProtonMail account, providing an option to the existing webmail interface.

In its announcement, ProtonMail explains how Bridge works:

“The Bridge essentially acts like a local email server (using the IMAP and SMTP protocols) and interacts with email clients also installed locally on your desktop computers. As a result, all encryption and decryption occur locally and thus the benefits of end-to-end encryption remain. The Bridge communicates with ProtonMail’s encrypted email server via our API, which supports end-to-end encryption, while email clients can communicate directly with the Bridge via standard IMAP and SMTP. In this way, standard email clients which do not natively support end-to-end encryption can support encryption without modification.”

By using the Bridge client, users benefit from full-body text search within their encrypted emails, and can also have their ProtonMail account alongside another email accounts, such as Gmail, meaning you can drag messages between accounts.

Installing and using the ProtonMail Bridge is very simple, just download the binary which is currently available for Windows and macOS. Once downloaded, install the client and add your ProtonMail account to the bridge. Then add your ProtonMail account to your email client and then configure your client’s settings.

While currently unavailable, ProtonMail has advised that a version of ProtonMail Bridge for Linux will arrive in spring 2018.